Creation Stories and States of Matter
The structure of creation stories reflects the complex physical, liquid crystalline state of living matter.
Having this in view, the Creator mingled earth with fire and water and mixed with them a ferment of acid and salt, so as to form pulpy flesh.
— Plato, Timaeus (1873)
Blood is thicker than water.
— English Proverb
Deucalion and Pyrrha, the only survivors of a flood sent by Zeus to punish King Lycaon of Arcadia for killing a boy as a sacrifice, are told by the Oracle of Themis they can repopulate the world if they “Depart from the temple with head veiled and garments unbound, and cast behind you the bones of your mother” (Bulfinch 1979). Realizing the earth was their mother, they pick up rocks, throw them backward over their shoulders (dynamic~solid), and the rocks become soft and mix with slime to make new people:
They veiled their faces, unbound their garments, and picked up stones, and cast them behind them. The stones (wonderful to relate) began to grow soft, and assume shape. By degrees, they put on a rude resemblance to the human form, like a block half-finished in the hands of the sculptor. The moisture and slime that were about them became flesh; the stony part became bones; the veins remained veins, retaining their name, only changing their use. Those thrown by the hand of the man became men, and those by the woman became women.
Mythology and philosophy are filled with examples of an appreciation for the fact that the physical situation of life is special, somewhere between hard and soft, wet and dry, movement and stillness, permanence and change, order and chaos, and generally that life is complicated compared to matter in nonliving physical conditions.
According to Empedocles fire, air, water and earth are engaged in an eternal cycle of transition between a relatively singular, orderly, compact cosmic sphere dominated by the attractive force of love and an opposite, chaotic, spirally cosmic expanse generated by the repulsive force of strife, with living things arising repeatedly throughout the cycle in periods between the extremes, when love and strife are in balance and the elements mix together in relatively equal proportions. Arguably, Empedocles’ cycle deserves as much as the water of Tsalal Island to be regarded as an original description of liquid crystallinity, in this case occurring almost 2,500 years before their discovery. Poe and Empedocles both reference three fundamental physical dualities: fluid~solid, dynamic~static and disorder~order, with the opposites of each interacting in complicated ways. These dualities also delineate perceptual dimensions, in that we recognize their constituents as fundamental opposites, and they apply for sensory systems in general, back to the first animals that were able to tell them apart.
In the ancient Chinese text Classic of Mountains and Seas the gods Fuxi and Nüwa create people from clay, animating it with the energy of divinity. Clay is used in Babylonian, Hindu, Polynesian, Laotian, Māori, Incan, Mayan, Korean, Vietnamese and many other creation myths around the world, according to Wikipedia (“Creation of Life from Clay” 2023). The Zoroastrian god Ahura Mazda used mud. The Sumerian god Anki used clay and blood. The Mongolian god Ulgen used clay floating on water. In Bornean mythology the constituents are clay and sound. Prometheus uses clay to make human-shaped figures and the Goddess Athena brings them to life with her breath. In Genesis people are made from dust and, again, an injection of breath.
In Mesoamerican mythology, Quetzalcoatl retrieves the bones of those who died in the period of the Fourth Sun from hell, has them ground up by a goddess, mixes them with divine blood and uses the resulting material to repopulate the world for the period of the Fifth Sun (Smith 2013):
Quetzalcoatl carried the bones to Tamoanchan, a place of paradise. The old goddess Cihuacoatl (“Woman Serpent”) ground them on a metate and placed the powder in a jade bowl. Quetzalcoatl and the other gods gathered around and shed their blood upon the ground bones, and the first people of the Fifth Sun were born.
Humans are made from a mixture of a blood and earth in the Enūma Eliš creation story of Babylon, according to the Wikipedia page “Babyloniaca (Berossus),” citing George (2021) and Beaulieu (2021):
Syncellus: There was a time, he says, when everything was [darkness and] water and that in it fabulous beings with peculiar forms came to life. For men with two wings were born and some with four wings and two faces, having one body and two heads, male and female, and double genitalia, male and female…. For when everything was moist, and creatures had come into being in it, this god took off his own head and the other gods mixed the blood that flowed out with earth and formed men. For this reason they are intelligent and share in divine wisdom.
Fluid and solid qualities are commonly applied to the formation of the world as a whole in addition to that of people. Initially, they might be indistinct, requiring separation by a god or cosmic force, or cycle between interaction and independence, even though there’s no particular observable reason to imagine the world being different in these respects than it is as we see it today. Ovid (2006) describes the world prior to creation in terms of paradoxical mixtures of fluids and solids in the opening of Metamorphoses:
Unfirm the earth, with water mix’d and air;
Opaque the air; unfluid were the waves.
Together clash’d the elements confus’d:
Cold strove with heat, and moisture drought oppos’d;
Light, heavy, hard, and soft, in combat join’d.
The idea of thermal and physical opposites being joined in combat and clashed together in confusion is reminiscent of the account of Norse creation from Snorri Sturluson (1907). The world begins with complex interactions between solids, fluids, heat, coldness, fire, ice, melting, solidification, motion and stasis in a primordial void called Ginnungagap.
That part of Ginnungagap… that lies towards the north was thus filled with heavy masses of gelid vapour and ice, whilst everywhere within were whirlwinds and fleeting mists. But the southern part of Ginnungagap was lighted by the sparks and flakes that flew into it from Muspellheim. Thus… whilst freezing cold and gathering gloom proceeded from Niflheim, that part of Ginnungagap looking towards Muspellheim was filled with glowing radiancy, the intervening space remaining calm and light as wind-still air. And when the heated blast met the gelid vapour it melted it into drops, and, by the might of him who sent the heat, these drops quickened into life, and took a human semblance.
The being with a human semblance is Ymer, ancestor to the jötunn, rivals of the gods. Ymer is said to persist on the milk of a cow, Audhumbla, who is also born from molten drops. Another being, named Búri, emerges from salty rime as it’s consumed by Audhumbla. Búri fathers Borr, who marries Bestla, daughter of the jötunn Bölþorn, and they have three sons named Vile, Ve and Odin. The brothers slaughter Ymer, flooding the world with blood and killing all the jötunn except for one, Bergelmer, who survives in a wooden vessel. Then they drag Ymer’s body to the center of Ginnungagap and make the world using his blood for seas and lakes, his flesh for earth, bones for rocks, teeth and jaw for stones and pebbles. They raise his skull over the earth to be the dome of the heavens and throw his brains in the sky to make “melancholy clouds.” Finally, with the world ready, Odin and his brothers add the breath of life to two pieces of driftwood on the shore, making the first humans, Ask and Embla.
Stories in which a creator being is broken up into parts of the world often distribute the material of the body in a sensible way, accounting for similarities between the state of the part and that of the divine being from which it’s made. Solid body parts become solid parts of the world like rocks and trees. Liquid parts become liquids like streams and rivers.
This is the case with the Chinese god Pangu, who lives inside a chaotic cosmic egg [disorder~round] where the forces of Yin are mixed with the complementary and contradictory forces of Yang: hot with cold, sky with earth, light with dark, chaos with order, stillness with movement and male with female. Pangu emerges from the egg and proceeds, for 18,000 years, to divide the elements as he expands to lift the sky and separate it from the earth. Eventually, his arms and legs turned into the directions, his eyeballs the sun and moon and his breath the clouds and wind. His teeth and bones turned into rocks and minerals, sweat became dew, hair became grass, flesh became soil and the rivers were made of his blood. Animals are the fleas that were on his body.
In the creation myth of the North American Okanagan Tribe, from an area spanning parts of present-day Washington State and British Columbia, Old One makes Earth Woman by stretching and rolling an earth-like dough (Leeming 2010). Her hair accounted for trees and plants. The soil was her body; the stones were her bones and her breath the wind. Old One blew on small parts of her to make the animals, and humans were constructed from red clay.
Ovid’s Metamorphoses says that after fish, terrestrial animals and birds were allotted to their respected habitats the supreme creator molded man from parts of heaven, earth, ether, warmth, moisture, fire and form:
Form’d from an heavenly seed; or new-shap’d earth
Late from celestial ether torn, and still
Congenial warmth retaining, moisten’d felt,
Prometheus’ fire, and moulded took the form
Of him all-potent.
Life’s intermediate physics is also implicit in various transformations throughout Ovid’s poem, with characters turning into both liquids and solids, which wouldn’t be possible without life being a mixture to start with. Perseus turns men to stone with the head of Medusa. Atlas turns into a mountain; Arethusa into a stream. Niobé becomes rigid marble flowing forever with tears, and Cyane melts into spring water:
You would have seen her members beginning to soften,
Her bones and her fingertips starting to lose their old firmness;
Her slenderest parts were the first to be turned to fluid:
Her feet, her legs, her sea-dark tresses, her fingers (for the parts with least flesh turn into liquid most quickly);
and after these; her shoulders and back and her bosom
and flanks completely vanished in trickling liquid;
and lastly the living blood in her veins is replaced by springwater and nothing more remains that you could have seized on.
For the Abenaki people of the areas now called New England and Quebec, the creator, Tabaldak, made men and women out of stone (Haviland et al. 2013), but Tabaldak was disappointed because the hearts of the people were cold and hard, so he broke them up into the rocks that occupy the area today. He then created the Abenaki again, this time successfully using (somewhat softer) living wood, and, like trees, they would dance when moved by the wind.
It’s common for creation to unfold in such stages, with a number of attempts that fail because the material employed is too hard or too soft before the right consistency is achieved. Disappointed by the lack of devotion they receive from the nonhuman animals they create, the Kʼicheʼ Mayan gods decide to make people, hoping they will be more religious, forming them from mud in the initial attempt:
So then comes the building and working with earth and mud. They made a body, but it didn’t look good to them. It was just separating, just crumbling, just loosening, just softening, just disintegrating, and just dissolving. Its head wouldn’t turn, either. Its face was just lopsided, its face was just twisted. It couldn’t look around. It talked at first, but senselessly. It was quickly dissolving in the water.
Next, they try carving humans from wood, only to find them equally unholy and nonviable, this time for opposite reasons:
They were talking at first but their faces were dry. They were not yet developed in the legs and arms. They had no blood, no lymph. They had no sweat, no fat. Their complexions were dry, their faces were crusty. They flailed their legs and arms, their bodies were deformed.
Proper people eventually come together by adding water for blood to the flesh of yellow and white corn meal, a mixture that’s softer than wood and harder than mud, but first the gods take out the wooden version of people using a flood, rebellious pets and homicidally angry cooking utensils, exemplifying the widespread aesthetic themes of inanimate objects coming alive and the destruction of solids:
They were pounded down to the bones and tendons, smashed and pulverized even to the bones. Their faces were smashed because they were incompetent before their mother and their father, the Heart of the Sky, named Hurricane. The earth was blackened because of this; the black rainstorm began, rain all day and rain all night. Into their houses came the animals, small and great. Their faces were crushed by things of wood and stone. Everything spoke: their water jars, their tortilla griddles, their plates, their cooking pots, their dogs, their grinding stones, each and every thing crushed their faces.
Few stories could match the one told by the Spokane Tribe of Eastern Washington concerning the physical diversity of ingredients that go into the people-making process (Brown and Ruby 1981):
Because he was lonesome, Coyote, after several failures, made Spokane man. In his first failure, he molded a man of pitch, who melted. He tried clay, but the rains washed the clay man away. He sculpted a man out of hot rock; it cracked. He wove a man of reeds; but this man caught fire and burned. Coyote then mixed all these elements together and — adding berries, smoke, and fire — created Spokane man. With these same elements, he created Spokane woman, and Amotkan, the Creator, gave her life.
The components of fluid~solid mixtures in creation stories can be either heterogeneous, as in breath mixed with stone or blood with bone, or homogeneous, as in clay or mud, and both types of mixtures are apparently amusing. In the first case the fluid gets more solid and the solid more fluid, in the second the starting material is already soft, although it may still be mixed with other ingredients.
The reason for so many cultures imagining almost the same scenario is that soft materials are closer to life in their texture than pure solids and fluids, which was apparent to the people inventing the myths and passing them on. Ultimately, it’s because of natural selection for liquid crystallinity and features that support it. We don’t need diffusion from a common origin narrative to explain why the myths are so similar, even though they come from different cultures and places, because people everywhere can readily observe that the constitution of humans and other animals is one of fluidity thoroughly mixed with solidness. If someone comes up with a myth that incorporates this structure (fluid~solid), it has a somewhat better chance of being adopted and passed on than one in which we’re made from either solidness or fluidity alone, regardless of the time and place.
Even though one can make sense of this pattern across creation stories using the fact that semisolid matter is a closer match for life than solid or fluid matter, there’s reason to think that the stories are also popular due to the existence of a preexisting bias in favor of fluid~solid mixtures. The same mixtures occur frequently in poetry and art, for instance, and in those contexts aesthetic value is the only possible explanation.
Perplexity
Perplexity’s response to “Creation stories in which clay is used to make life.”
Creation stories featuring clay as the foundational material for human life represent one of humanity's most widespread and enduring mythological motifs. Across cultures and continents, ancient peoples developed remarkably similar narratives in which divine beings sculpt the first humans from clay, earth, or mud, breathing life into these earthen forms. This cross-cultural phenomenon suggests deep symbolic resonance with humanity's relationship to the earth and the creative process itself.
Perplexity’s response to “How often do creation stories incorporate order and chaos?”
The motif of order emerging from or conquering chaos represents one of the most widespread themes in human mythology. This pattern appears across diverse cultural traditions, from the ancient Greeks' primordial Chaos giving birth to ordered cosmos to the Mesopotamian Enuma Elish where Marduk defeats the chaos goddess Tiamat. The Hebrew Bible's account of creation from tohu wa-bohu (formless void) and the Egyptian emergence of Ra from the primordial chaos waters of Nun further demonstrate this universal pattern.
Creation stories across world cultures exhibit a remarkably consistent pattern of incorporating themes of order and chaos, with approximately 77% of creation myths featuring these fundamental opposing forces as central elements.